


Hive

by wyvernwood



Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Genre: Bug-like Aliens Who Canonically Are Inside Vector, Bug-like Aliens Who Hive Mind With Humans, Established Relationship, M/M, Nonbinary Character, Oroboro Nest Killiks and other Killik-like aliens, Other, Weird smut, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:40:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25116295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wyvernwood/pseuds/wyvernwood
Summary: Doctor Eckard Lokin is pleasantly surprised when hisveryclose friend Vector, Dawn Herald of the Oroboro Killiks, arrives earlier than expected for a visit. It provides an opportunity for the two of them to help each other out with life or death matters, and there's time for simply enjoying each other's physical company as well.
Relationships: Vector Hyllus/Eckard Lokin
Comments: 7
Kudos: 7
Collections: Little Black Dress Exchange 2020





	Hive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [venndaai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/gifts).



> Venndaai - I was inspired by your request and also in part by your own story with this pairing (and attempted to make this story consistent with that one). I liked the idea of Vector using plural pronouns even more than canonically, and enjoyed writing them as nonbinary.
> 
> But since the canon uses he/him pronouns for Vector, I wasn't sure of which category I should use, and went with using both M/M and Other for the same pairing after discussing with a beta reader.

The fingerling crawled up the back of Eckard's hand onto his shoulder. It was not really a Killik, though it had been bred from one; it was a part of no named Hive. Instead, it sang to Eckard and its siblings and cousins in their terrarium hidden in the wall of his modest Alderaan home. Laboratory. Hideout. All of those, and none. It was too temporary to be a home, too ill-furnished to be a laboratory, too obvious to be a hideout. He had rakghouls in a pen in the garden.

Eckard liked Alderaan. He liked the way the air smelled. There sometimes was a caustic stink to it from the weapons used by one side or another in pursuit of a temporary advantage, but most of the time it was clean, cool, and fresh. It wasn't the best place to research his most vital concern, the rakghoul plague, but he would rather be dead than live on Tatooine or Taris. And of all the places in the galaxy, Alderaan had the best chance for him, despite the difficulty of obtaining rakghoul mutation materials. Alderaan had the Killiks.

Alderaan had the Oroboro nest and, best of all, the Oroboro nest had Vector. 

Vector visited as often as they could, and lately that was around once a week. Those visits were something to look forward to, a break from the bucolic chores and intense scientific pursuits that occupied most of Eckard's available time. He was keenly aware of the limits on his time. 

But even one as single-minded as he was needed breaks. Needed friends. And Vector was nearly the only person left he could trust, now that Cipher had vanished as completely as only a person like her could manage.

The Rakghouls in the garden started up a racket, and Eckard wondered if he should risk one of the fully trained fingerlings to scout it out. No, he decided, for now he could tell what was riling them up, and it was a familiar visitor. Vector had arrived early. 

Three Killik had accompanied their Dawn Herald as far as the edge of the Rakghoul pen. They stood there, watching Vector cross the pen, watching the creatures yelping but making no move to attack the Joiner as they strode toward Eckard's front door.

The pen was positioned as it was mostly to discourage casual visitors, and it served that function well. It also provided a warning against stealthy assassins as long as the keen rakghoul senses detected them. There had been only one attempt Eckard had to fight off without at least that warning, and at the time he'd had a highly functional attack droid to assist him. 

He really was retired. There was no need for such attacks to continue. He'd had a word with a couple of the right people, and there hadn't even been a disturbance since. He wasn't sure how long the respite would last, but he thought his little hive might be ready to help when the time came.

Vector was standing in front of the door when Eckard opened it to them. "We are pleased to see you looking well, Doctor Lokin," they said. 

Eckard wasn't sure who they were playing this for, but he found it amusing enough to play along. "Come in, then, Master Vector," he said, and waved his visitor inside.

It wasn't amusing enough to keep going for long. His eyes met Vector's solid black gaze and he put his hand at the back of their neck, pulling them into a deep kiss. 

Vector returned the kiss with their usual intensity and focus, but didn't hold it as long as Eckard would have liked. They weren't breathless when they broke it off. "We have not come to see you purely for personal reasons," Vector said.

"How disappointing," Eckard said, but he had known. Three Killik warriors didn't follow Vector around on pleasure trips. Something was up.

"The Empire has called on our allied hives to provide soldiers in the war against the Eternal Empire," Vector said. Eckard was going to say something, but he didn't have to. Vector kept going. "As you told us would happen. So, we have come to you for the aid you said you would be able to provide."

"They'll make nothing but cannon fodder of you, despite the potential. But you can preserve more of yourselves if you have the expertise. I've made a list for you." Eckard tapped the data pad and pulled up his list of eleven names. "These are people who have excellent tactical knowledge. As Joiners they will give your nest an advantage in any battle, whether or not they are deployed themselves. And their profiles make it clear that they will find the Joining a gift, as it should be. They will benefit from becoming one with Oroboro."

"Will they Join willingly?" 

Eckard shrugged. "Most don't, do they? But it will help them, whether they want it or not. That's all you require, isn't it?"

Vector looked away and did not answer. 

Eckard changed the subject. He pressed his palm to the seal on the little hive in his wall, and its covering lifted, the dozen small insects turning to the light that now shone into their home. "They're coming along beautifully. I've managed to train a few to crawl onto me. They don't want to go inside me, though. I haven't managed to breed them to compatibility with the virus yet. I lost a few trying to add one of the rakghouls outside to the link." The fingerling peered out from under Eckard's collar at Vector.

Vector stared at the small creature intently, then held out their hand near it. It crawled onto their palm and they held it there, stroking along its back. One of Vector's own small commensal Killiks slipped out to join it from somewhere inside them and the two looked at one another eye to eye, antennas reaching forward to touch. "This creature sings a song both like and unlike the Hive. As if another Hive were among us, yet one that left longer ago than even the Great Migration, and lost their ability to share with us."

"I've managed to breed them so they can link with me, when I dose myself with the right pheromones." Eckard laid out his plans for Vector. He would be able to use the not-quite-Killik insects to create a sort of hive of himself and his rakghouls, enabling their use as a fighting force he controlled, without his having to transform himself. It would also enable him to, once the creatures were able to tolerate the virus, use the fingerlings to mutate the rakghouls as he wished, the same way Killiks mutated their own bodies and those of their Joiners. "It may save my life," he ended. "You know how little time I have left." Years, but not a decade. Given the work that had to be done, it was not much.

"We do not want to lose you," Vector said softly.

Eckard lifted the hand that Vector wasn't holding insects in to his lips and kissed their knuckles. "Not planning to get lost," he said with a grin.

"How can we be of help?"

"I was hoping you'd ask. I do have something in mind." He rubbed their hand, that he still held, affectionately against his cheek. They let him do it, placing his fingerling back on his shoulder and putting their own Killik to their ear. "Would your little friends mind a couple of mine going inside you? Maybe if they get some practice, they'll be able to do better in me or the rakghouls."

Vector's eyes looked distant as they communed with the Hive. "We do not know if it will be safe for them inside us, but we believe it will be safe for us," they said. 

"Thank you. If they have problems in you, where so many of your own hive-mates are safe, then it might be a problem with their construction that requires me to start over. I hope that is not the case, but better to know now than later. If the problem with their being inside a rakghoul is the virus, as I've hypothesized, then they'll be fine." 

"You are talking to yourself, not to us," Vector said. "How might we prepare for this practice?"

Eckard felt a grin widen on his face. "That depends. How social is this visit allowed to get?"

Vector's returning smile was almost shy. "If you are prepared to sacrifice the efficiency of your experiment for our pleasure, we can be as _social_ as would please you." They illustrated their willingness by beginning to remove their traveling clothes.

Eckard kept glancing over to watch Vector undress while he set things up. He moved a cot near the wall where the fingerlings lived, put a fresh disposable cover on the cot's mattress along with a pillow at one end, and set his devices on a low table by a chair next to the cot. "It's all right if I take a few samples, Vector?" he asked. Before he and Vector met, they had been experimented on without their knowledge or consent, but Eckard would never allow it to happen again.

Vector came over and sat down on the cot, then lifted their legs onto it and lay prone. They were entirely naked. 

Eckard took the opportunity to admire the lines of their body. The Killiks had made few visible changes in the time since Eckard had first seen them like this. 

"You may. We trust you not to harm our -- my body." Vector's expression as they looked up at Eckard felt so overwhelming that he had to close his eyes. 

Behind the closed lids, his eyes stung, and he squeezed them tight before opening them again. "I won't." He wanted to say _I love you_ but words like that could only be said when he didn't mean them. Vector knew anyway, he thought. "Get comfortable. Then have your little friends immobilize the motor functions in your arms. That will make my fingerlings feel safer, and they'll be able to explore." 

Vector licked their lips, then carefully placed his arms at an angle to his sides, palms up, hands open. He spread his legs only a little, his feet about shoulder-width apart. "We have told them not to restore movement until the visitors have gone," they said, a barely audible tremor in their voice. 

Eckard felt warmth fill him, a liquid sensation very close to the effect of certain intoxicant drugs that his system no longer tolerated. He had enjoyed their effects, but he enjoyed this more. Vector's trust was itself a heady intoxicant. He thrilled to return pleasure in exchange for that trust, that allowance of intimacy. It might make him less efficient a scientist, but he didn't care. 

Extending life meant more if that life was more worth living.

He stroked Vector's forearm, feeling the warmth of their skin, the soft human texture, the tiny hairs rising to meet his fingers in instinctive response. There, the tiny gap a small roughness to his fingertips, invisible to his eyes though it was. Just at the underside of their wrist. He lifted the best-trained of his fingerlings from its lair, scooping his fingers through the pheromone trail the insects produced as he did so.

After setting the not-quite-Killik down on Vector's wrist, he dabbed the pheromone into the corners of his eyes, then licked the rest of it off his finger. That would renew the connection between Eckard and his little hive that had attenuated since his last dose of the pheromone. He felt their sharp little minds come into focus within his internal vision. Silently, he coaxed the one on Vector's wrist into the opening. "It's going in," he said softly when the creature responded. 

"We feel it." Vector's voice was quiet. "Its song is strange, but beautiful. Its aura is not like yours. Shouldn't it be?" 

Eckard slowly traced his index finger up Vector's arm, willing the creature to follow. He could feel a slight movement under their skin as the insect did as their collective will desired. He paused it at the shoulder, trying to sense what the tiny Oroboro Killik had done within Vector to immobilize the arm. There, the nerve, there, a small bump where some sort of paralytic had been injected. Clever creature!

He had his fingerling take a minute sample of the paralytic agent, and a scrap of uniquely folded protein from the nerve sheath. A variant form of myelin was being produced by this protein. That might have all sorts of applications, including in his own case. 

The creature did feel safe within Vector. There was a remarkable sense of satisfaction he felt, they felt, the hive mind that was Eckard and the fingerling and all his other fingerlings felt, at being inside Vector. The others wanted to enter the Joiner, too. The one who was not safely behind transparisteel in the hive hovered down from Eckard's shoulder and lighted on Vector's other wrist, finding and entering the port there without Eckard's conscious guidance.

It paralleled the path the first insect had taken in Vector's other arm, finding a node in nearly the same spot, though it appeared Vector's arms were not identical. The second fingerling was in their left arm, which had smoother passageways as if Vector's own hatchling symbionts spent more time there and had made the trails through the Joiner's body more easily traversed. 

A wave of desire flooded through Eckard and he, too, wanted to be inside Vector. He was, and he wasn't. Giving the decision very little thought, Eckard took his clothes off and did the necessary preparation to be able to fuck. He and Vector had done this before, though not in this most unusual situation. He hadn't thought this would -- or he had, but later -- he'd had fantasies since he came up with this experiment idea about what he could do with Vector, the careful stimulation his fingerlings could do from within the Joiner's body, the heights of pleasure he could bring them to, but he had not expected this urgency.

He had not thought being an insect in Vector's arm was so erotic. It didn't seem like it should be. It simply _was_.

He was over Vector, looking down at them, asking with urgent kisses and looks, and Vector was nodding, saying, "Yes, yes," arching their hips, ready to take, to be fucked. So Eckard did. His cock was fully lubricated and he eased it into Vector and felt his lover respond, still unable to move their arms, but that didn't stop them from making their enthusiastic participation apparent.

Once he was inside, all the way inside, the urgency wasn't so overwhelming. He rocked gently against Vector and saw where the creatures were going, exactly where he'd planned when he thought he'd be sitting calmly in the bedside chair for this part of the process, not lying atop his subject and beloved rutting like a beast and not even having become one. Eckard had not the slightest urge to be more rakghoul in this moment. 

The fingerlings were almost like fingers, stroking Vector from inside with light caresses, instinctively knowing where it would feel best, with the decades of medical expertise of the doctor and the multiplied and delicate senses of the insects that together made up the being who was making love to the Oroboro Hive, to the Dawn Herald, to a human Joiner called Vector, to the person he loved most in all the worlds. 

They reached a climax and they all slipped out of Vector's body and the two fingerlings huddled behind Eckard's ears as he and Vector held each other tightly in their arms, lying together on the cot. Eckard rested his head against Vector's shoulder and breathed the sweet-spicy scent of their hair and the faintest echo of Oroboro pheromones. He felt Vector's heart beating in their chest.

It was more than Eckard could recall the details of when it was over. He wrote down everything he could as the connection to his little hive faded. He had them deposit the samples they'd taken from within Vector while he still had been thinking of doing that into his sample bags.

"Your new smaller selves are extraordinarily tender," Vector said as they sat up on the cot, leaning over to look at Eckard taking notes. 

"The rest were unhappy to be left out, but they aren't well enough trained yet for me to let them at you," Eckard said. He put away his data pad, having recorded all he needed of his immediate impressions, and sat down on the cot next to Vector. "Thank you for allowing me --"

"You were wonderful," Vector said, and kissed him. "We do not need thanks for being given pleasurable experience."

"--to take samples," Eckard said, changing his tack to win the argument.

Vector, always the diplomat, smiled and let him have the last word.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Hive (illustration)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27039136) by [venndaai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai)




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